Image by Joscelyn Gardner

You're One Sick Dude, Thomas Thistlewood | Joscelyn Gardner's "Accubah" was inspired by passages from the plantation owner's sordid journals.

This week, Jill and Mandy venture over to SNAP’s main gallery to examine the intricate drawings that make up Joscelyn Gardner’s exhibit Missionary Position.

Jill: According to her artist’s statement, Gardner’s work was inspired by historical events — in particular, by entries from the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th-century plantation owner who wrote of his dominating sexual encounters with his female slaves. The resulting drawings are detailed, exciting, and a little bit painful. What did you think?

Mandy: From an esthetic point of view, these drawings were absolutely wonderful to me. Gardner depicts intricate arrangements of fine hair that’s been shaped, pulled, weighted, and adorned, and isolates them on frosted Mylar. The contrast between those repetitious black lines and the cool white translucency of the Mylar is pure visual indulgence, at least to my eyes.

Jill: I think the Mylar was an excellent choice for a ground for these drawings. Its translucency suggests a visceral, skinlike surface, which heightens the personal aspect of these drawings more than if they were simply printed on typical paper. You almost feel as though these drawings were done on some sort of strange skin. But how did you feel about the presentation? I thought the pins were cleverly functional as both a tool to hang the drawings to the wall, as well as an echo of the themes of bondage and sadism.

Mandy: Yes, the pins were good, sadistic stuff. I thought the back wall with the ultra-flat black lines of columns worked particularly well. The columns play both a thematic and formal role, framing the larger sheets but also addressing the cultural scale of the work. The pinning definitely heightens that Mylar-as-skJin sensation. I’m noticing that we’re both calling these things “drawings” over and over; aren’t they actually prints?

Jill: They are lithograph prints, but Gardner didn’t actually print them — she drew them, and then she got a master printer to print them for her. Clearly they’re more like drawings to her than prints, which is why I think it’s appropriate to refer to them as such. The only aspect that I thought wasn’t fully working for Gardner was her use of the quotations in the exhibit. She has printed quotations of what I assume were excerpts from Thistlewood’s diary onto the Mylar and interspersed them with smaller drawings of what seems to be crotch hair. While the aesthetic rhythm of the drawings and the quotations and even the quotation marks was well-executed, I’m not sure of the particular value of including the quotes themselves, rather than simply allowing the powerful drawings to stand alone.

Mandy: It’s amazing that you call it “crotch hair” rather than pubic hair. But yes, triangular patches of curly hair. I agree about the quotations. They serve a very important purpose in terms of linking the images to Gardner’s source material, but including them as a part of the visual representation feels like a distraction. The images encompass the issue themselves; the script therefore becomes kind of unnecessary. The exception to this would be the “Missionary Position” map.

Jill: I was a fan of that map, but in the way that I’m a fan of most maps. On the other hand, I was particularly interested in the way that Gardner used font in an unexpected, almost secret way: those captions printed in white on the translucent Mylar in the bottom left-hand corner of the larger drawings were something special.

Mandy: Map drawings do tend to be pretty consistently likable. To be fair, though, so do works on frosted Mylar. I get the sense that Gardner is well aware of that fact too.

Jill: I think you’re right. I also think Gardner has thought out her mediums fairly specifically, and the result is a cohesive show of beautifully intricate drawings which, even if you don’t have a background knowledge of the work or its meaning, command your full attention.